IRISH

Between 1800 and 1920 Ireland was the most
emigration-prone of all European countries.
Political and religious repression under British
rule, rapid population growth, periodic
famines, and the absence of domestic industrialization
prompted approximately eight
million Irish women and men to seek a better
life abroad. Before the Great Famine of the
1840s, Canada was a favored destination of
this exodus, while the majority of postfamine
emigrants were attracted to the United States.
When the Great Plains of both countries was
opened up after about 1860, it was not surprising
that the Irish, with their long tradition of
migration in search of economic opportunities,
were conspicuous agents in the westward
spread of white settlement. Like many other
newcomers, the Irish sought to mitigate the
dislocation of transatlantic mobility by transplanting
core elements of their traditional culture
to their new environment. Consequently,
the settler societies that emerged in the Great
Plains north and south of the forty-ninth parallel
owed much to the traditions, institutions,
and ideological orientations of the Irish.

The agricultural potential of the Canadian
Prairies was first noted by Capt. John Palliser
in 1857, and over the next decades fellow Irishmen
Millington Synge, John Macoun, and
Clifford Sifton worked to promote the settlement
of the region. When the initial pioneer
phase was completed in 1911 the Irish were a
significant element within the emerging provincial
mosaics. Almost 160,000 people, comprising
13.1 percent of the population of Manitoba,
12.2 percent of Saskatchewan, and 10.9
percent of Alberta, were of Irish ethnicity. Approximately
10 percent of these were Irishborn,
but the majority.more than 65 percent.
were the descendants of earlier Irish
emigrants to eastern Canada, with Ontario
being the largest source. The remainder came
from the United States. Although spread
across a range of occupational categories, the
Irish who migrated to the Canadian Prairies
were motivated primarily by the desire to own
land. In 1911 more than two-thirds lived in
rural areas and were either homesteaders or
farm laborers working to accumulate the resources
necessary to begin homesteading.

As with the larger Canadian Irish population,
Protestants outnumbered Catholics by a
margin of two to one among the western Irish,
and typical also was their respective attachment
to two peculiarly Irish institutions—the
Orange Order and the English-speaking Roman
Catholic Church. Both of these had
evolved over centuries in the homeland as expressions
of Irish Protestant and Catholic cultures,
and they subsequently became vehicles
for the intergenerational transmission of these
two Irish identities throughout the diaspora.
Because of their early arrival on the Prairies,
these institutions became forums for integrating
the Irish with other nationalities,
promoting social cohesion in ethnically diverse
frontier societies. Although frequently
at loggerheads with each other on sectarian
grounds, the Protestant and Catholic Irish
were nevertheless in agreement on the desirability
of cultural conformity and the primacy
of the English language in the creation of a
new western Canadian identity.

The experiences of the Irish who settled in
the American Great Plains were even more
varied than those of their counterparts north
of the border. As early as the 1820s Irish lumbermen
were following the timber trade
west through Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin,
and by the 1860s significant numbers of
Irish families were homesteading in Nebraska,
Kansas, and Texas. Railroad construction, on
the Kansas Pacific for example, brought more
Irish to the Plains, and others came with the
military. Eventually, Irish founded such Plains
towns as Garryowen, South Dakota, O'Neill,
Nebraska, and Chapman, Kansas, and there
was a major Irish immigrant presence in such
cities as Denver and Omaha. In Omaha, for
example, in 1880, Irish occupied 44 percent of
the city's blocks, with a concentration around
the Union Pacific rail yards.

The vast majority of the Irish who settled
in the American Plains were Roman Catholics
who came directly from Ireland, and the
Church remained central to their communal
lives. The fate of the homeland was also an
abiding concern. Thus, radical Irish nationalist
organizations found strong support among
Irish Americans in the Plains, and these served
to promote both Irish particularism and
working-class militancy. Because of their
numbers and organizational cohesion, the
Irish became a dominant force in local politics
at the turn of the century, and this brokerage
position allowed them to act as Americanizers
of other European ethnic groups that subsequently
migrated west.

An analysis of Irish settlement in the Great
Plains suggests that the popular stereotype of
eastern urbanization and ghettoization represents
only one dimension of the North American
Irish diaspora. Although anti-Irish prejudice
lingered as a structural barrier, especially
in the United States, the Irish nevertheless
possessed certain advantages. Early arrival,
white skin, Christian adherence, proficiency
in the English language, familiarity with the
democratic process, and the ability to exploit a
wide range of economic opportunities all presaged
success. Thus, the Irish must be viewed
as central agents in the massive continental
transformation represented by the creation
of white, Christian, commercial settler societies
in the Canadian and American Great
Plains during the second half of the nineteenth
century.